Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

jail—and a date.
    In the fish and chip shop I thought of a story my uncle told me as he brought me to Limerick bus station the previous year.
    ‘They get baked jam roll and baked custard in Cork Jail. Better than they get from their mothers. One fellow was given a month and said to the judge, “That’s great. I get baked jam roll and baked custard there that I don’t get from my mother.” “All right,” said the judge, “I’ll give you three.” ’
    Later, in a room in a house in North Dublin where there was a false pigment art deco light shade with tassels, a picture of St Dymphna, patron saint of people with nervous disorders, my father spoke, as he was laying out a handkerchief of robin’s-egg blue and rose squares as he might have laid out a Chicago tie once after a date with a Protestant girl in a tango-orange dress from whose house Joseph Schmidt could often be heard on the street singing in Italian, about cycling with other young men, some with aviator hairstyles, when General O’Duffy was president of the National Athletic and Cycling Association, to swim in the Suck at Ballygar.

Larks’ Eggs

    There was a hotel on Tay Lane at the back of the town between river and canal, run by Pancake Ward, a little man in a spec cap with a Connemara weave who wore hobnail boots, where young, middle-class men hid out when their families were in dudgeon with them and my father had to stay there for a few days because of his relationship with a Protestant with bangs, Miss Husaline.
    His hair still smelling from Amami shampoo after a trip to Dublin with Miss Husaline, in a tie with cedar-green and asparagus-green bars, flannel trousers, navy socks with jay-blue stripes; there was a chamber pot with purple peonies, pink anemones, fern under his bed, and by night a young English travelling player, with hair crescendo-curled to one side, who was staying there, would wander around in a Jaeger dressing gown, studying his part aloud:
For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as sphinx, as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair;
And, when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.

    In the mornings there was a view of the river, of Teampollín, an ancient church with surround houses where illegitimate and still-born children were buried. The monks who’d lived there wore iron chastity belts. Now there was an erotic air about the grass, the ruins.
    In the summer women would wander on a monk’s pass—a path leading from one monastery to another—by the Suck, collecting bur-marigolds for smallpox, measles, or to rub nipples during breast feeding, wild thyme for menstrual disorders, chest infections and sore throats, plantain—waybread—for dry coughs, haemorrholds, beestings.
    It was the year 1934. The calves had been slaughtered in Ireland in February of that year because of surplus and the Land Annuities dispute with England, and in August the Tailteann Games, re-enacting funeral games in honour of Queen Tailte of Ireland, had been held in Dublin. In January of the previous year Hitler had become Führer and in June of that year General von Schleicher, his wife and others were dragged from their beds and slaughtered. The carillon of children’s voices could be heard from the Protestant national school, with its Gothic, diainoiid-pane windows, with a recitation:
Far as the tree does fall, so lyes it ever low.

    A short while before my father stayed there an American in hobo dungarees had stayed in the hotel. He ran out of money and stood in the Square with the spalpeens—roaming men looking for a day’s work. The Lazy Wall was on one side of the Square. The spalpeens gathered on the other. The American was carrying his banjo. When they asked him what he could do he said: ‘All I can do is play the banjo.’
    The English travelling players came to the town every October after the fair when the green in which they pitched their marquee was like a sea, the colours like that of a late autumn blackberry bush penetrated by late afternoon sunshine.
    In the entr’acte of Love’s Labour’s Lost that he attended while in the hotel, Phoebe Rabbitte, a Protestant lady, in a hat with a cockatoo feather, offered my father a cigarette from a chased cigarette case. Phoebe Rabbitte’s black Daimler could frequently be seen parked outside the chrome-green Medical Hall, from whose roof snipers used to fire with Gatling